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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27625966">Not Gonna Leave You</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElzyZombie/pseuds/ElzyZombie'>ElzyZombie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emotional Hurt, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Light Angst, Love Confessions, Mind Control Aftermath &amp; Recovery, Reunions, Romantic Fluff, Unexpected Visitors, they work together so well, where are our CHILDREN CAPCOM</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 17:00:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,660</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27625966</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElzyZombie/pseuds/ElzyZombie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hey, uh... Is a Miss Jill Valentine here?"</p><p>"Carlos! . . . What happened to 'supercop' ?"</p><p>- - -</p><p>Jill is recovering in the hospital after the events leading up to her brainwashing, kidnapping, and Wesker's eventual demise. A lone visiter comes to comfort her, someone whom she hasn't seen in over a decade...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Carlos Oliveira/Jill Valentine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>52</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Not Gonna Leave You</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The hospital walls were white. Pure white, smelling of bleach and lavender and clean linen. Jill wondered, as she lay in her bed with stitches in her chest and an IV snaking over her forearm, how many times did they need to wash blood from their fronts.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Turning away from the almost-overwhelmingly bright interior of her room, Jill looked out the open window. A vase of colorful flowers sat next to the still, catching the wind and wafting the sweet scent of spring in her direction. A handwritten note—of course, because Chris wouldn’t just let some machine write a heartfelt letter—sat next to the vase. Despite how tired she was, Jill smiled at it.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Rest up and get well, partner. Don’t push yourself, and meet you on the field again soon. — Chris.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill could even hear his gruff laugh at the end of his note. </span>
  <em>
    <span>“Soon”</span>
  </em>
  <span> was relative, of course. After being experimented on for five months, mind-controlled for God-knows how many of those, and pushed to the breaking point time and time again without any sign of relief, it would be at least a </span>
  <em>
    <span>little</span>
  </em>
  <span> bit longer than “soon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The smell of something sweet overpowered the flowers. The door creaked open behind her, and a familiar voice made her tired heart stop.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, uh… is a Miss Jill Valentine here?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill whirled herself around, hardly believing her eyes when she met Carlos’ deep, warm ones. His hair was still a mess, but he had pulled the mop back into a messy topknot that allowed his bright-but-nervous smile to grace his entire expression unobscured. How much she had missed that goofy, innocent smile…</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Carlos!” she shouted, forgetting for a split-second her surroundings and trying to sit up. The IV tugged against her arm and she grimaced, prompting Carlos to worriedly rush over to her bedside. She held up a hand, and smiled at him. “What happened to ‘supercop’?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All at once, she was back in the helicopter after Raccoon again. He laughed that jovial, all-encompassing laugh that shook his hair as he caught his breath. It was overbearingly nostalgic. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing can keep you down, supercop, I should’ve known better,” he replied with a shake of his head. From behind his back, he pulled out a small container filled with cookies. “I, uh… I brought some homemade cooking for you. Thought you might be sick of the crap they feed you here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gratefully, Jill took the container. As the gift was exchanged, their hands touched—his skin was warm, soft. It made her realize how cold and calloused her fingers had become.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As she stared again into those dark brown eyes, tufts of blonde hair waved in her face. Her stitches twinged.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>What happened to us?</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Thank you,” she smiled, placing the box on her lap and opening the lid. The smell of the freshly-baked treats filled the room. “I was starting to think they wanted me to eat the flowers with how many they were giving me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos chuckled again. “Yeah, unfortunately the common gift isn’t the most practical, eh?” He pulled up a chair from behind him, settling himself near the side of her bed. His eyes wandered over her tattered, broken body, the lighthearted emotion slowly dropping from his face. Jill pushed a blonde strand of hair behind her ear. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He cleared his throat, changing the topic. “I came over as soon as I heard that they found you. Alive, I mean. Before, when I heard that you…” Carlos turned away, putting a hand to his mouth and stroking the side of his face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey.” Jill leaned over the side of the bed, hearing the IV hanger squeak in protest, but ignoring it. She grabbed onto his hand, pulling his gaze into hers, showing her that while everything else may have changed, they still stayed the same.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She nodded to him. “I wasn’t just gonna die and leave you in a cold, cruel, Jill-less world.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Before Jill even knew what was happening, she was wrapped up in Carlos’ arms. He held onto her gentle enough to mind her wounds, but tight enough to let her know that he meant it. Slowly, she wrapped her arms around him. He smelled of gunpowder and spices and the outside. And oh, how she missed it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I knew you wouldn’t,” he choked, coughing again to clear the tears from his words. “I just couldn’t believe you were dead. I couldn’t believe that I lost you, and the thought that you might’ve died without any backup, or search parties, or…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill let him compose himself for a little bit. The wind once more blew through the open windows, and the soft scent of lilacs and lilies wrapped around them. The curtains flapped against the hospital room walls. Those clean, white walls. Carlos’ grip loosened as he pulled back to look at her again at eye-level.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I shouldn’t have left you,” he confessed. “After Raccoon, after we went our separate ways… it was killing me the whole time. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t know how to tell you that.” He laughed once, a bittersweet sound. “Hell, I thought you’d send me home like a misbehaving kid at recess. But then…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill saw that face before, somewhere she wasn’t even fully aware that she was seeing it. She was being carried, somehow between sleep and consciousness and life and death. Doors opened and closed. Voices shouted and whispered. She was in another hospital, one where the walls were painted with blood. She now knew why she saw such stains on her own walls.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos was there. He sat much like he did now next to her bedside, but he was tired. More than he was now—gore clumped his hair together and dirt smeared his clothes. He sat with his elbows resting against the chair’s back and his face turned towards her. Her vision fell in and out of clarity. But she still saw him, she saw his scarred, stained face. It had the same expression as it did now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was love.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill took a deep breath, tempting the silence to see if he would break it first. “But then I died,” she answered when he didn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos sniffed. He muttered something halfhearted about the pollen, but she could see his lips quiver as he spoke. “Yeah. Then I heard about your mission with Chris and Wesker, and I… I know it’s stupid, but I was furious. I took responsibility, even though I wasn’t even there, for crying out loud.” He tried to laugh, and it worked for the first breath. “Then I started blaming. I blamed Chris, I blamed Wesker, I even blamed you. You, of all people!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill smiled at him, leaning on her knees and placing her cheek in her palm. “Well, I mean, putting my life in danger wasn’t a ground-breaking addition to my resume of dubious decisions.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With a genuine chuckle, Carlos leaned back in his chair. His eyes scanned the ceiling but didn’t see past the memories that overwhelmed his senses. “You got that right,” he replied. “It was nothing new for either of us, honestly. But I just…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos’ face grew stern. He settled himself on the edge of his chair and looked into Jill’s eyes. He ignored the blonde hair that stubbornly flew in her face, the scars ground into her chest in a shape too perfect not to be man-made, the wrinkles under her eyes from the years she had to take on too quickly. He just looked into her eyes. He always did.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I regretted not being there to risk my life with you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill sat there on her white bedsheets in a white room that was filled with far too many memories of Raccoon to be called clean. She wanted to grab Carlos’ hand, but hesitated. She knew what it meant. She knew that as soon as she called him “partner,” there was no going back. He was coming down with her to the deepest of pits where escape seemed almost impossible, to the cities where fires littered the streets like cars, to the places where beating hearts were more of a happy memory than a reality.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And somehow, she knew that he understood that. Jill grabbed his hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You better not pull a stunt like you did last time,” she told him, furrowing her brow and tightening her grip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos reached further down her arm, grabbing the area below her elbow as if he were going to pull her up from falling. “Hey, that’s my line. And besides,” he quipped with a wink, “I said I wasn’t gonna leave you in a cruel, cold, Carlos-less world. And I still mean it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jill rolled her eyes, but held onto his arm with the a steady grip. “You better.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carlos laughed again, carefully but playfully squeezing her arm. “Same goes for you, supercop. Now treat yourself to one of those cookies, you look like you need it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Letting him go with a sigh, Jill was brought back to the welcoming scent of home-cooked treats and flowers. “Says the man with the kicked-puppy eyes,” retorted she as she handed him a cookie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He grinned that goofy grin again. “Okay,” he relented as he accepted the treat, “maybe we </span>
  <em>
    <span>both </span>
  </em>
  <span>need one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Laughing with a heart lighter than it had felt in years, Jill took a bite out of her cookie. It tasted sweet, chocolatey, with some spices thrown in that must have been Carlos’ own original spin on the recipe. She wouldn’t expect anything different, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Partners till the end,” Jill mused under her breath, hardly realizing she said anything until Carlos snapped his beaming, crumb-encrusted face up to her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Partners till the end,” he affirmed, nodding.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They tapped their cookies together in a toast to all the partners who came before them, and to the partners who still lived to this day.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>We've all been living in a cold, cruel, Carlos-less AND Jill-less world for God knows how long, I think we deserve this.</p><p>I was looking through some of my old, unfinished fics and found a whole file filled with Valeviera fics. Guess what you guys are gonna be seeing a lot of in the future.</p><p>I would gladly kill for a Carlos/Jill reunion, ESPECIALLY when Jill is recovering. You've wronged us for too long, Capcom, we need to know how our children are doing.</p><p>Hope you all enjoy the fic!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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